New drive questions; Fill SSD no more than 75%?

[CSGOaddict]

Just bought as a secondary drive: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZGJYLNL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

Some questions:

• Steam shows my drive as having 511.98 GB vs File explorer shows 478 GB?
• Do i have to take precautions and not fill the drive over 75% to keep it in good health? Or has this precaution already been taken in factory?
• Anything else that i need to do aside from initializing the drive before I can start using it?

Thx in advance!

[Guest]

You want to have ~20% of your SSD empty, so it can be used as a SLC cache which is way faster than TLC. You'd especially want it for that SSD since afaik it doesn't have a DRAM cache. (I was wrong, It does have a dram cache, you should still keep 20% empty) (I was wrong again).

Edited August 16, 2020 by Guest

[Applefreak]

512 GB or 511.98 is the unformatted capacity while 478 will actually be usable. My ADATA 512 shows 475 GB usable, so that's fine.

You don't have to reserve space, but I would recommend to regularly look at the wear level of the drive. Should it reach 50 percent, you may start loosing data or the entire drive.

Make sure to have write intensive tasks (big files) on a mechanical drive or use a cheap SATA-SSD that you can live without and have easily replaced, should it ever die.

[minibois]

4 minutes ago, CSGOaddict said:

Steam shows my drive as having 511.98 GB vs File explorer shows 478 GB?

Windows is lying to you and Steam is telling the truth.

Your drive is 512GB (roughly), which is 477GiB (roughly). Windows uses the latter way of showing numbers, where (simply put) 1 = 1024, while the drive manufacturer (and Steam) show GB where 1 = 1000.

 

So Windows should actually say your drive is 478GiB (Gibibyte)

6 minutes ago, CSGOaddict said:

Do i have to take precautions and not fill the drive over 75% to keep it in good health? Or has this precaution already been taken in factory?

For the best performance you'll want to keep a portion free.

This drive uses some of its memory as an SLC cache, which it needs plenty of space to keep the cache.

8 minutes ago, CSGOaddict said:

Anything else that i need to do aside from initializing the drive before I can start using it?

Nah

[Cyracus]

6 minutes ago, Darpyface said:

You'd especially want it for that SSD since afaik it doesn't have a DRAM cache

I think you were right the first time https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/silicon-power-p34a60-m2-nvme-ssd

[CSGOaddict]

3 minutes ago, Cyracus said:

10 minutes ago, Darpyface said:

You'd especially want it for that SSD since afaik it doesn't have a DRAM cache

I think you were right the first time https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/silicon-power-p34a60-m2-nvme-ssd

Yeah I don't think it has dram, has "Host Memory Buffer (HMB), and SLC Cache to deliver high and efficient performance"

[CSGOaddict]

10 minutes ago, Applefreak said:

You don't have to reserve space, but I would recommend to regularly look at the wear level of the drive. Should it reach 50 percent, you may start loosing data or the entire drive.

Any tool you'd recommend to check the health?

[CSGOaddict]

9 minutes ago, minibois said:

For the best performance you'll want to keep a portion free.

This drive uses some of its memory as an SLC cache, which it needs plenty of space to keep the cache.

Any way I can set a hard limit of 75-80% so I don't go over it? Like maybe im stupid and accidentally install a game too large/ i don't really trust myself.

[Applefreak]

I just use HWInfo64 but you can use other utilities like it. Most drive makers will offer some kind of tool that shows the wear level.

[Applefreak]

1 minute ago, CSGOaddict said:

Any way I can set a hard limit of 75-80% so I don't go over it? Like maybe im stupid and accidentally install a game too large/ i don't really trust myself.

Caching is a non issue with games as it will only affect large write operations. So a one-time installation may slow down or a large file transfer over from another drive maybe.

[CSGOaddict]

1 minute ago, Applefreak said:

Caching is a non issue with games as it will only affect large write operations. So a one-time installation may slow down or a large file transfer over from another drive maybe.

Actually my main SSD, i almost entirely filled it up (also didnt have a dram cache), and it's been kinda messed up since, large writes slow down the entire system and even cause freezes sometimes, so i just wanna take some precautions haha.

[Applefreak]

I have a SSD without DRAM cache as well that is filled up with only 10GB left (out of 480). Not a problem with the games already installed, drive wear is at 95% at the moment. The games that are on there don't get any updates anymore so no write operations really. For work intensive stuff I am old school, I have a RAID 0 with 2 WD Gold 2 TB drives.

Also my Crucial SSD came with a Software called Crucial Storage Executive, that has an option to utilize RAM for better caching, I haven't tried it though.

[porina]

SSDs have built in overprovisioning, so you don't need to force yourself to leave some space free. Having more free than that might or might not help a bit, but I really wouldn't worry about it. If you really want to limit the amount of drive that can be used, you can reduce the size of the partition holding data on it.